I’m working on a new book / workbook for program managers with the above tentative name (going for funky, might be getting clunky).
Like the First Principles Guided Journal that I’ve shared with full subscribers to this newsletter, it’s a series of short, super-simple explainers followed by worksheets that help you organize your own program. Unlike the First Principles Guided Journal, it goes through the whole process, from first designing the program through not ruining your personal reputation if it goes bad (also, how not to let it go bad like that).
This section I’m sharing below talks about how easy it is to set up a program to fail in the Fusion Era, when change is a constant and there’s no place to hide your mistakes. Errors cascade with a speed and ferocity that can blindside us if we’re not looking for them, and it won’t take weeks for our mistakes to come to the surface. Everyone will know, fast.
The book/workbook should be available in March, and I’ll get you the details on how to get it here. As with most of my work, full subscribers get a free copy. If you’d like to get a steady dose of Future Readiness and special access to upcoming books and events, you can sign up below.
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Part 1: Get clear on what you want - and on your assumptions. They could be all wrong.
The history of Western-led public investment in developing countries is jampacked with disasters, from urban renewal in the U.S. to dams in Africa. In most cases, those failures can be traced back to one of two fundamental mistakes:
1 ) The well-intentioned program developers didn't clearly understand what the program should do, and/or
2) The program was set up on assumptions - sometimes assumptions that people didn't realize they were making - that turned out to be wrong. Sometimes massively wrong.
Sometimes massively wrong in ways that they didn't realize were even possible until long after the damaged was done.
Our Mastodon-Avoiding Brains
Our brains are set up to take shortcuts, minimizing the amount of decision-making energy we have to use so that we have some left to hunt the mastodon or run away from the giant sloth or whatever (palentology is not my strong suit). Everything in us pushes us to take all the shortcuts we can get. It's super difficult to cut to the core of our fundamental assumptions, and even harder - and more unsettling - to challenge them.
But we don't have giant sloths anymore. And we live in a welter of unbelievably complex systems. Conserving energy in case we have to run away from the mastodon can just as easily get us flattened by the 747 we weren't looking for.
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My 4th grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Taylor, introduced me to one of the few bits of wisdom I actually remember from my childhood:
"When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me."
(You can imagine why that stuck)
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Like I said in the first section, we often assume without realizing that we're assuming. Those are the most dangerous assumptions, because those are the ones that we can't see coming. They're the ones that will blindside us when they turn out to be wrong.
So Part 1 of Not Screwing Up Your Program requires putting significant brain power into two items:
Getting as clear as humanly possible on what your program intends to accomplish, and
Laying out your assumptions in the most stark relief possible.
What will your program accomplish?
When you're dreaming up a program, it's tempting to linger in your imagination. If you care about your work, you know all too well all the problems that need to be solved. And it's natural, as a good-intentioned person who wants to solve those problems, that your first inclination is to try to do everything. We know that's not possible, but we still too often do that - by making the program's objectives as idealized, expansive and vague as possible.
And that shoots you and everyone else in the foot.
Grand but vague objectives might make you happy, and they might be particularly well-suited to your higher-ups, who aren't interested in getting into the weeds. And you (or they) might be tempted to keep the scope broad and fuzzy because then you don't have to answer uncomfortable questions about why one pet issue or another wasn't included. Or maybe you're channeling your inner Nostradamus, and you don't know exactly how to get to your vision, but you figure someone else can figure it out.
All of those are risky bets.
If you don't clearly define what you're looking for, chances are you will get a lot of responses - mostly completely off track. It's like flinging a handful of pebbles versus firing a pistol: since you can't much control where the pebbles go, the odds of any of them hitting your target are slim to none.